Some Congressional Democratic leaders and party strategists raised concerns today about remarks made by senior Bush administration officials last fall that they had received no warnings about the type of terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11.

The House Democratic leader, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, suggested that some of those statements should be part of the wide-ranging Congressional inquiry about the failure of the intelligence community to detect plans for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

''That obviously needs to be part of the overall inquiry,'' Mr. Gephardt said in an interview. ''We need to know what people knew, and when they knew it and what they did about it. I don't know what the facts are.''

The White House reacted with anger today at the criticism from several prominent Democrats after the disclosure on Wednesday that President Bush was informed on Aug. 6 that Osama bin Laden's terror network might be planning jet hijackings. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said that any Congressional inquiry should be ''free from politics.''

''I think that the American people want to focus on a united approach that prevents further terrorist attacks,'' Mr. Fleischer said. ''They will welcome an inquiry if it's free from politics, led by the responsible experts, and the determinations of what should be looked into are made on the basis of intelligence analysis and not political considerations.''

Democratic strategists have compiled excerpts of statements about earlier threat assessments in the days and weeks after Sept. 11 that were made by a half-dozen senior administration officials, including Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

In most of their public comments made in the days after the attacks, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials said there was ''no specific threat'' of that kind of terror attack. This week, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and other administration officials said the president was never told -- and American intelligence officials had never fathomed -- that terrorists would use commercial planes in the type of attacks that killed 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

For example, just a few hours after the attacks, Mr. Fleischer was asked by a reporter on Air Force One, ''Had there been any warnings that the president knew of?''

''No warnings,'' Mr. Fleischer said.

Mr. Fleischer said his response to the Sept. 11 question was appropriate. ''Flying on Air Force One, with the destruction of the attacks still visible on the plane's TV sets, the only way to interpret that question was that it related to the attacks that we were in the midst of,'' he said. ''There is no other way to interpret it.''

On Sept. 12, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, ''I have not seen any evidence that there was a specific signal that we missed.''

On Sept. 16, Mr. Cheney acknowledged that American intelligence officials had received information during the summer ''that a big operation was planned'' by terrorists, possibly striking the United States. But he also said, ''No specific threat involving really a domestic operation or involving what happened, obviously -- the cities, airliner and so forth.''

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Asked that same day about earlier terror threats, Mr. Bush said the horrific suicide attacks were unfathomable to government leaders. ''Never did anybody's thought process about how to protect America -- did we ever think that the evildoers would fly not one but four commercial aircraft into precious U.S. targets,'' the president said. ''Never.''

Senator Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, said today that some of the senior administration officials' public remarks made in the days and weeks after Sept. 11 now appeared to have been ''carefully worded.''

''It looks well crafted to use the language of 'no specific threat' when we now realize there was a significant amount of information of a more generalized threat,'' Mr. Torricelli said in an interview. ''There is almost never a specific threat. Blueprints of terrorist attacks are extremely rare.''

Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton White House press secretary, said: ''It's clear once they sort of caught their breath, they took parsing to a brand new level. They were very precise, so that they could always go back and say we answered that question without lying, but trampled the spirit of our language. They left the impression that the August briefing didn't happen.''

Mr. Fleischer responded to that criticism by saying that administration officials made accurate statements last year about the summer threat assessments. ''The administration had generalized information that was reflective of what the intelligence community had gathered,'' he said. ''It did not have specific information that airplanes were going to be used as missiles and bombs to attack New York or Washington.''

Democratic strategists said that the disclosure eight months after Sept. 11 about the hijackings threat assessment given to Mr. Bush demonstrated that the administration was often reluctant to share important information with the public.

''I doubt they were trying to cover up that specific Aug. 6 briefing, which I think was general in nature,'' said John Podesta, the chief of staff in the Clinton White House. ''They certainly were not forthcoming about the general threat environment that they were facing in July and August. Dick Cheney has set a standard in Washington for not being forthcoming about answering legitimate questions. And in retrospect, they would have been well served to have gotten this out earlier.''

This week, officials said that the briefing document provided to the president on Aug. 6 was an ''analytic report'' that mentioned several possible methods that the Al Qaeda network might use. One was hijacking a jet. But Dr. Rice and other administration officials said the Aug. 6 briefing was not seen as a warning. ''There was no specific time or place mentioned,'' Dr. Rice told reporters on Thursday.

Lawmakers from both parties have demanded that the White House release a copy of the Aug. 6 briefing document.